The Unabomber: Maniac or Genius?

There is a fine line between a genius and a madman. One man’s hero is another man’s villain. Take Brutus; some will forever call him a hero for bringing an end to the tyrannical reign of Caesar, but to others he is the man who opened the door to a greater evil in the form of Augustus, let alone the heights of his treachery to Caesar who treated him like a son. ‘Frame of reference’ is a very important concept that can turn an argument on its head. As children, our first run-in with ‘Frame of Reference’ is in 8th grade Physics. Maybe a concept with such real-life applications should be introduced to children earlier?

In the Netflix series Manhunt:Unabomber, the show quite beautifully captured the oxymoron that is the Unabomber. The story is depicted in an unbiased way, delivering the ideas of the man himself while also trying to help the viewer fathom the destruction and the pain of which he was an agent. By the time you reach the final episode of this real-life dramatization, the intellectual in you will sit up and say to yourself, “Jesus, he’s right!”.

The FBI famously struggled for years to hunt this man down, not because he was a disgruntled handyman, but because he was a man with an IQ of 167. This was a man who held a Phd in Mathematics but struggled with basic human emotions. The story goes that with each bomb that was mailed to a pitiful victim, there were cryptic letter that accompanied them. Finally, he wanted to publish a paper he wrote called Industrial Society and its Future, which became famous as The Unabomber Manifesto. He wrote to the Washington Post and The New York Times to publish the same and after the FBI were informed about this, they gave the green signal to The Post to get it published in order to use forensic linguistics to try and crack down on a way to pinpoint a suspect.

The entire saga is a joy to learn about because this wasn’t a thug who was dealt with tear gas and guns, this was a battle of wits between the FBI and a man that gave them the run-around for years. To this day, his manifesto is available online as a PDF or a copy of it can be purchased as a paperback from Amazon. It is odd to see law authorities allowing the words of a criminal to be so easily accessible but one can truly be grateful to be able to access this astounding work.

This manifesto, though published in the early 90s, still resonates today. It states that we have developed technology and enslave ourselves to it. When you stop at a red light on an empty road, you are no longer acting based on free will, you are acting based on the orders of an LED. The manifesto also states that the populace will consist of conformists majorly who will label the intellectuals who challenge authority as lunatics and put them in cells. This too has an eerie resemblance to what we experience today. The world is run by the un-remarkables with politicians and celebrities lacking the understanding of 5th grade science. These same un-remarkables vilify the people of knowledge when they are presented a concept that they cannot fathom.

The world’s most text-heavy app, Twitter, is populated with public figures who lack grammatical and logical strength of any kind. The Unabomber was eventually right, wasn’t he? Make no mistake, none should sympathize with a serial killer who devised his bombs to be more lethal each time they were placed in a brown box to be delivered, but was this just a by-product of his social awkwardness and lack of empathy? The man built a cabin for himself in the woods and lived there in order to stay away from not just technology, but people as well. Ted Kaczynski‘s tale should have been a greater warning towards the perils of not nurturing basic human communications at an early stage in a child’s life but that aspect was quite easily pushed under the rug.

If Ted was counselled, taught how to deal with his emotions, guided on how to voice himself and live in society, he might not have lashed out by sending bombs to innocent people. He might have harnessed his intellectual prowess, while maintaining his anti-technology stance and used it for good and not anarchy. The Unabomber saga teaches us a lot of lessons that we as a race should learn from, Ted Kaczynski’s manifesto should not be dismissed as the ramblings of a mentally unstable person but embraced for its intellectual value that it holds.

You can find the Unabomber manifesto as a paperback here and as a PDF here. I encourage everyone to read the manifesto with an open mind. Wipe out the memory of the Unabomber for a moment and read the manifesto as a paper published by Ted Kaczynski, The Mathematician. Once you do that, you might just appreciate his ideas.

One cannot sympathize with the Unabomber, for he is a criminal, but in the year 2020 we are so much more dependent on technology that we give credit for, maybe his paper published in the 1990s holds more meaning in modern times.